Whither Afghanistan

The other day I happened to hear a discussion with legendary reporter Helen Thomas, who has covered the White House since the Kennedy administration. She commented that she would like to hear President Obama explain why we are at war in Afghanistan.

Now, I presume that by this question she's hoping to get the administrations goals and preferred outcomes, and that she hasn't forgotten why we went there in the first place. However, her question follows a line of other Afghanistan doubters who make the following points:

• We're losing.
• By historical parallel, it's extraordinarily difficult to win in Afghanistan, so we won't win either.
• The US has no pressing national interest in Afghanistan.
• The US popular support for the war is waning.

Let me address those in order.

We already won. Or more precisely, the alliance of people we supported toppled the Taliban thugs who were running that country. Mullah Omar would be captured, jailed, and perhaps executed if the winners hadn't deferred to the position of a "holy man". And we did it quickly, within weeks. The only reason we consider the war still on is because it's politically expedient to do so - it makes it easier to get the funding needed to try to rebuild the country.

The historical parallels are instructive, but fall apart in one major point: the United States doesn't want Afghanistan - the Soviet Union and Britain did. While we objected to the Taliban government, we did nothing about it until they were shown to be willingly harboring people who killed thousands of Americans and who planned to kill more. There are only three reasons it matters to the US who runs Afghanistan now - we want them to be friendly to us, we don't want them to offer safe haven to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and because we don't want other countries laughing at us behind our backs ("hey, did you see the bozos the Americans left in charge of Afghanistan? What a bunch of maroons!").

Which takes us straight to pressing national interest. We're pretty darned certain that the old Afghani government provided a safe haven for terrorist groups to operate openly and train people who intended to overthrow various countries by force and violence. There's apparently reason to believe that some of their leadership is still there or in Pakistan. Maybe we should try to make sure that after we leave Al Qaeda won't just set up shop again so they don't fly airplanes into more of our buildings or any of a hundred other ways to kill thousands of Americans. I'm just saying.

And on waning popular support: this is probably true, according to all the polls. If support gets too low, that will pretty much kill the effort. On the other hand, popular support is not a tremendous predictor of success (just how popular was "the surge" in Iraq before it started showing results?). US leadership does need to do a better job of saying what they're trying to accomplish, why they're doing it, and what it will take.

I'm hoping that, or something like it, would be President Obama's answer to Ms. Thomas.